5. Erin
ERIN
The morning’s patient list fits on one page, and by eleven the clinic has gone so quiet I can hear the autoclave cycling in the back room.
Linda shelves supply orders she’s been waiting on for two weeks, working through them in her own methodical way, each item checked twice before it goes up.
I’ve been at my desk since eight with a cup of coffee I’ve reheated once and a stack of charts Whitlock has been transferring to me without ceremony, without gratitude, just here is where I left off .
I take them the same way. We haven’t talked about it.
The arrangement has established itself as work.
At a quarter past eleven, he appears in my doorway with his jacket on.
"You and I are going to lunch," he says.
I blink. It’s not an invitation. I close the chart.
Joan’s is half-empty at noon on a slow day.
The lunch crowd comes at twelve-thirty. Whitlock knows this; he chose the time deliberately, which I only understand when we slide into the back booth.
She doesn’t come to seat us or hand us menus, just brings two waters and two plates of today’s special without being asked: chicken pot pie in a thick ceramic crock, biscuit on top, side of mashed potato and green beans.
Whitlock wraps both hands around his water glass and looks out the window at Main Street, and I wait.
"Six months," he says, to the window. "That’s the record. The one before you was a PA from Wenatchee who got a better offer from a sports medicine group and gave me two weeks’ notice."
I look at my water glass.
"The one before her lasted four months. Internal medicine, very bright, did not enjoy the winters.
" He picks up his fork and uses it to push the biscuit to the side of the crock.
"Two locums in the last year. That’s not a complaint.
" He looks at me. "I’d gotten out of the habit of hoping that would change. I want you to know you’ve gotten me back into it. "
Oh.
I take a bite of the pot pie. The gravy is deeper than it looks, thick with thyme. I let the sentence settle.
He doesn’t rush it. We eat. Joan comes around with the coffee and fills Whitlock’s cup without asking, pauses at mine, and I shake my head. She moves on. The quiet has room in it.
"So. What brought you here," he says between bites of green beans. Not a question.
I look at the window. Main Street. Hank’s Garage across the way, the Bluebird next door, the dry-goods store with the plate-glass window I’ve been walking past every night. Nothing that looks like what I left in Denver.
"A boy," I say. "He was six."
Whitlock nods, refills my water glass. He doesn’t look at me when he does it. Just tips the pitcher and sets it back and puts his hands around his cup. Listening.
"He had bone marrow failure syndrome. Severe aplastic anemia. I was his hematologist." The clinical register is easier to stand inside. Measurable, bounded, familiar. "There was a treatment option, an experimental one, an escalation of the standard protocol. I pushed for it."
He nods again, chewing.
"The committee didn’t approve it. He didn’t respond to the standard therapy. He died." I set my fork down. "Six months later the hospital adopted the protocol I’d proposed."
Whitlock is quiet. He’s not looking at me with the face that telegraphs sympathy as an exit ramp, the one that means I’ll say something kind and then we’ll move on.
He’s just listening. His hands are around his cup and his eyes are on the table, and he’s listening like a man who has heard bad news in this booth many times before.
"They didn’t tell the family," I say. "His parents. I found out at a conference." The words come the same way they always have in front of doctors looking to pass the time. Flat, blunt, worn smooth from carrying them. "I left during the coffee break and didn’t go back."
Whitlock turns his cup once in his hands. He looks up. "Did they ever find out?"
"No."
"They knew exactly what they were doing." He shakes his head. "That’s what the system does."
We eat the rest of the meal in a quiet that has earned itself.
Walking back to the clinic, he doesn’t say anything about what I told him.
He holds the door at the clinic entrance the way he always does, wide, unhurried, and when I pass through he falls in one step behind me and that’s that.
Linda looks up from the front desk, takes in his face and then mine, and looks back down at what she was doing. She doesn’t ask.
That afternoon, a rocking chair gets delivered to the clinic.
I’m at my desk at two when I hear the front door, and then Lito’s voice lifts, the sound that means something better than a patient has walked in, and then something large and wooden being maneuvered through a doorway.
I come out of my office to find David Perry in the waiting room with a rocking chair in his arms.
It’s a beautiful thing. Low, solid, the wood a warm amber grain.
It has heft without looking heavy. The chair Whitlock’s had in the waiting room corner since before Linda can remember is the kind that wobbles under a rested elbow, and this one has clearly been built to last until someone makes a point of destroying it.
"Cleo picked the finish," David says. He sets the chair down in the corner where the old one lived, which someone has moved. Lito, probably. He’s already got the old chair tilted to the side to roll it out of the way.
"I had the cedar," David adds, with a shrug, and declines to make it larger than it is.
Cleo is two steps behind her father, beanie on, both pigtails intact today, a green marker in her fist. She’s looking not at the chair but at me.
I notice, now that she’s closer, the construction on her left arm.
A cast, homemade, assembled from what appears to be most of a paper towel roll, a cardboard sleeve, and enough scotch tape to wrap a Christmas present.
It is listing slightly to the left. It has been signed in three places already, in Cleo’s own handwriting.
"The rocking chair’s for sick people," she announces. "So they have somewhere good to sit."
"That was the assignment," David says. He rights the chair, runs one hand along the back rail to check the set of it, and steps back.
"It rocks really well," Cleo says. "I tested it!"
"Seven hundred times," David says.
"Eight hundred," Cleo corrects.
I look at the chair, at the cedar grain and the even joinery at the arms, the way the runners meet the floor without catching. He built it so well the joinery disappears.
"It’s so good," I say, and it comes out quieter than I meant it to.
Beside me, Linda claps once, softly, into her palm. She’s smiling with one corner of her mouth.
David glances at me briefly, before looking away.
Cleo has arrived at my elbow. She tugs at the sleeve of my white coat and extends the cast with the bristling pride of someone presenting a diploma. "I fell," she says.
"When?"
"A little while ago."
I look at David. He looks at the ceiling.
"Did you see a doctor?" I ask.
"I’m seeing one now."
I press my lips together. Behind me, Lito makes a sound that might be coughing. I crouch down to her level, same as I always do: eye-to-eye, her terms. She holds out the arm with great patience, the green marker uncapped and pressed into my palm, her gap-toothed smile egging me on.
I take the arm gently, the way I would a real one.
The cast shifts under my hands, the cardboard lightness of it, tape pulling at the edges, and on instinct my thumb finds the muscle of her forearm through the gap at the wrist where the tape hasn’t quite closed.
I give it the lightest clinical pressure.
Cleo winces, small, almost a flinch. Then she’s looking at me again with full attention.
I’m probably wrong about what I just saw.
Fingers to the spot: warm, no swelling, full ROM, no point tenderness. She’s been pressing on that arm with a marker for an hour. The ache is within normal limits.
I find a clear patch of cardboard and write.
B-R-A-V-E G-I-R-L.
Block letters, the marker’s tip a little dry on the downstrokes. Cleo watches my hand the whole time with the focused attention of a surgeon observing a technique. When I’m done she reads it, slow, lips moving, and her whole face opens.
"Daddy, look! She wrote Brave Girl."
"I can see that."
"That’s what it says, see, see?" She turns it toward him as evidence. "Brave. Girl."
"Brave girl is right," David says.
She turns back to me. "Can I keep it on?"
"Not in the bath," I say.
"I’ll be careful with it!"
"We’ll discuss what careful means," David says.
She cradles the arm against her chest like it’s in a real sling and moves to inspect the rocking chair with renewed authority, climbing into it with both knees and getting it going with one foot. I stand up.
"Nice work," I say. I mean the chair. He knows I mean the chair.
David looks at it. "Wasn’t too bad a repair, once I got into it." He runs a hand along the back rail. "You can’t tell where the old wood ends."
"No," I say. "You really can’t. Amazing."
From behind his desk, without looking up from his computer, Lito says, "Two weeks, you said." He clicks something. "That was, hmm... five days ago?"
David's gaze darts to Lito before bouncing back to me and the chair. The tips of his ears have gone red. "Time to go, Cleo."
Cleo stops rocking. "But Daddy, we just got here!"
"I don’t make the rules, pumpkin. Let’s go."
"What rules?"
"Coat."
She climbs out with great reluctance, casting one last look at the chair like she’s leaving something unfinished. I walk them to the door. Just the lobby, just the front threshold, the clinic’s glass door with the bell above it that rings each way.
David gets the door and I reach for it at the same time. My hand lands just below his. Neither of us moves. The cold comes in from outside and I’m looking at the collar of his jacket, and my gaze flits up to his eyes, and he’s looking at something just past my shoulder.
My hand is warm, and so is his. I pull back.
"See you," he says.
"See you."
The bell rings. The door swings shut on the cold. I stand there for one beat longer than I need to. Behind me, Lito clears his throat, but I don't turn around.
"That," he announces, to no one in particular, "is where it all starts, y’know."
I take the clipboard from under my arm and smack him gently on the shoulder. He yelps, theatrical.
I hear Linda call out from the back hall, her tone dry, "Whatever it is, he deserves it!"
I go back to my office and close the door at the latch and stand in the middle of the room for a moment with my hands at my sides. Then I pick up the chart I was reading and sit down to cover my face with it.
My face has somehow gotten so warm, too.
I’m in the cottage in my oldest pajamas, hair down for the first time in six days, feet tucked under me on the sofa.
Hank had the sedan waiting in front of the clinic when I locked up, fixed whatever the ice did to the undercarriage and left the keys with Lito, wouldn’t take anything for the labor.
I drove it home in the dark and sat in it for a minute before going inside.
The wood stove is going. Linda slipped me a bottle of Cabernet as a welcome gift the first week, and I’ve been working on a glass of it since six-thirty.
I’ve been replaying the brush of his hand on the door.
It was a hand on a door handle. The door just needed holding, really.
Four seconds was all it took. Four seconds of adjacency caused by a glass door, a man who brought in a chair, and a reflex I have.
That’s it. That’s the clinic. That’s Cedar Hollow being a small town where everyone touches the same door handles. No big deal.
And David Perry repaired a chair in record time for a waiting room, and his six-year-old came by with a cardboard cast on her arm, and I wrote two words on it, and then the door happened.
I take a sip of wine and think about Whitlock’s water glass, and the pot pie at noon, and the way he listened to me without doing anything about it except refilling the pitcher.
I think about a rocking chair built from cedar.
I think about brAVE GIRL in my own handwriting on a six-year-old’s arm, and the way her face glowed when she read it.
I think about four seconds of warm wood and my hand coming back.
And then I think about the rocking chair in the afternoon light, and the way his eyes didn’t leave mine until the cold air hit, and the tips of his ears going red. I press both hands to my face. It’s warm.
I can't remember the last time I allowed myself to feel any of this.
Tonight, alone, with the stove ticking and the snow piling against the porch railing, I let it sit. Small and warm and a little stupid, the way being twenty was, when the world still felt like it made sense. The way I have not let any of this be —
A fist hits the door. Three hard blows. The wine glass tips as I rush to my feet.